GetYourGuide: Embarking on a hypergrowth journey with SAP
Creating a scalable digital core to fuel business growth
GetYourGuide, an online marketplace for travel experiences, offers more than 100,000 experiences from 20,000 travel operators worldwide. As a company in hypergrowth mode, it needed to consolidate fragmented systems and manual processes in finance. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition enables it to quickly process large and increasing data volumes.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Media – Travel technology | Berlin, Germany | >800 employees | Ernst & Young GmbH and DXC Technology |
days freed up in month-end closing, down from nine to seven days.
booking per second processed in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
employees using SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Head of Finance Systems, GetYourGuide Deutschland GmbH
Transforming finance to handle hypergrowth
GetYourGuide is a Berlin-based marketplace bringing online what is generally a largely offline industry of travel experiences, activities, and things to do. Through its website and mobile app, available in 22 languages and 40 currencies, travelers can discover and book more than 100,000 activities that include top sights, such as the Eiffel Tower and the Vatican Museums, and unique, immersive experiences. GetYourGuide is part of the growing experiences economy, which is predicted to reach $1.5 trillion by the end of 2024.
The company’s ERP solution was outdated, and it was outgrown by the large volumes of data the business generated. This impacted numerous activities, from transaction processing to reporting and more. The integration capabilities between the marketplace and the noncustomer-facing ERP were lacking, resulting in several data silos. For example, some information resided only in the marketplace, and marketing content was housed in reporting systems, with both data sets disconnected from the back-end system. The company relied on Microsoft Excel files to manually amass the information, and the accounting process was very slow given the many different data sources.
GetYourGuide’s mission is to unlock unforgettable experiences for travelers around the world, helping them make memories. Elevating their customers’ travel experiences and enabling innovations required the company to transition to comprehensive digitalization, especially in the back-end finance functions. To process the high transaction volume and to scale to meet the expected tenfold growth over the next five to ten years, GetYourGuide wanted to achieve financial automation and transparency along with integration and compliance.
Head of Finance Systems, GetYourGuide Deutschland GmbH
Connecting data to a digital core for greater transaction processing
As a technology and cloud-first company, GetYourGuide traditionally custom-built its own solutions. The start-up wanted to adapt its immature finance and accounting processes to take advantage of broad-based and best-in-market solutions. It chose SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition to strengthen its finance and accounting processes and allow expansion of the code base. GetYourGuide joined forces with the SAP Hypergrowth Catalyst program team focused on high-potential startups. The team assisted with the selection and implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud as the stable and scalable foundation for GetYourGuide’s business and growth ambitions. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition is used for the customer-booking component of the order-to-cash process, and the supplier-invoicing capability is currently in the deployment phase. Other processes covered include procure-to-pay, booking-to-expense, and record-to-report, with the SAP Fiori design system providing the interface for employees.
GetYourGuide partnered with Ernst & Young (EY) due to its prior project experience, good partnership, and the tight timeline for the greenfield ERP implementation. EY consulted on the initial workshops and process design. DXC Technology also assisted with the deployment, which was carried out with the SAP Activate methodology and the SAP Best Practices Explorer tool. This helped GetYourGuide structure the project, team, and phases and to discover best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud. And the SAP Trust Center site gave guidance in areas such as cybersecurity and data privacy.
The business is currently learning more about the functionalities and features of the RISE with SAP solution, SAP Business Technology Platform, and SAP Integration Suite, such as low-code apps, before their implementation next year. Another possible future deployment is the SAP Analytics Cloud solution, which offers business intelligence and predictive analytics capabilities.
Head of Finance Systems, GetYourGuide Deutschland GmbH
Increasing data-processing capacity, speed, and visibility
GetYourGuide now has 18 entities and more than 800 employees worldwide using SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. In 2019, the company couldn’t manage the booking transaction volume in one day, and the finance team had to extract data from different sources at month end. By mid-2023, the business could process more than one booking per second, the highest in its history. It also shortened month-end closing by two days, from nine to seven days, and aims to free up one more day.
With improved productivity, the 10-strong finance team is freed up to focus on more value-added tasks. The improved data quality at source helps in the areas of consolidation, planning, and reporting. While the previous system architecture demanded manual intervention, there’s now a reliable system where data automatically flows from point to point. The threefold to fivefold increase in data flows has been stabilized, and the company can rescale itself to handle significantly larger data volumes without having to increase staff numbers as it grows.
GetYourGuide’s business segments are sports, culture, food, and nature, and segment profitability is calculated externally. Given the previous technical performance issues, the finance team had to decide which segment data to enter in the ERP solution. With no capacity to process data at a granular level, it had to aggregate information. Now, the team can integrate far more data into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, enabling it to manage information that’s sent on for reporting purposes and providing visibility into the segments to help tailor marketing campaigns. Another advantage of using an SAP solution is that auditors know what to expect with regard to content.
Head of Finance Systems, GetYourGuide Deutschland GmbH
Unlocking benefits beyond finance processes
Instead of building systems from scratch, GetYourGuide intends to introduce new solutions for other processes in the finance department and further afield. This will help improve cross-team collaboration and innovation and unlock benefits in other business areas. The SAP software addresses both the front-end and back-end needs of GetYourGuide’s marketplace. So, similar to enabling customers to pay with different currencies and methods, the company will be able to invoice and pay suppliers in different regions, currencies, and ways (such as using e-wallets) next year. Rolling out SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition for the supplier part of the order-to-pay process lays the groundwork for future payment methods, such as payment orchestrators. And with Europe moving to e-invoicing in the next one to two years, the online travel business is safe in the knowledge that it has a reliable and integrated system in place to support innovation.
Featured partners
Ernst & Young GmbH is part of Ernst & Young Global Ltd. (EYG), with 300,000 employees in more than 150 countries. EYG has been helping companies grow for 100 years, supporting them in developing new business models, assessing risks, and driving digital transformation. The consultancy helped GetYourGuide implement the ERP system and was involved in the workshops and process design.
Also assisting with the ERP deployment was DXC Technology. With more than 60 years of innovation across 70 countries, the IT services company uses the power of technology to build better futures for customers, colleagues, communities, and the environment. Its staff of 130,000 helps customers modernize operations and drive innovation across the entire IT estate. The company advises on business process outsourcing, analytics and engineering, applications, security, cloud, IT outsourcing, and the modern workplace.